May 05, 2006

Freedom!

"The United States said on Friday it had flown five Chinese Muslim men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison to resettle in Albania, declining to send them back to China because they might face persecution.

The State Department said Albania accepted the five ethnic Uighurs -- including two whose quest for freedom went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- for resettlement as refugees. (...)

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on April 17 to consider whether a federal judge could free two of the five men -- Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim -- even though the U.S. government had determined that they were not enemy combatants. A federal judge had found their continued detention unlawful.

Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights representing the two men, said their case was due to be heard again in court on Monday. Olshansky said the U.S. government's decision to send them to Albania was made "to avoid having to answer in court for keeping innocent men in jail."

"We had no idea they were going to Albania. We didn't have any time to get anything on the ground to assist them with resettlement or to find out about whether they are trying to send them into some kind of detention," Olshansky said."

Two of the five are Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu al-Hakim, the detainees I have written about here, here, here, and here. Now, after more than four and a half years in prison, they would appear to be free to see their families, including children they have never met, and to try to put their lives back together again.

I imagine it would be odd to be a Uighur in Albania. Still, it has to be worlds better than being locked up at Guantanamo, trying to make sense of the fact that over a year after you have been found not to be an enemy combatant, you are still in prison, and wondering when, if ever, you will be released.

***

Arguments in the Uighurs' appeal were scheduled to be heard on Monday morning. (I was going to go to DC to hear them.) I wish I could think it was just a coincidence that after over a year of searching, the administration found a country willing to take the Uighurs today. But I can't. This administration has built up quite a track record of freeing people (or, in Jose Padilla's case, bringing unrelated charges) just in time to render their appeals moot, thereby preventing the courts from finding their conduct illegal or unconstitutional.

They held Yaser Hamdi for years without charges, on the grounds that he was a dangerous terrorist who did not need to be tried, and then, when the Supreme Court claimed that he had a right to contest his imprisonment in a neutral forum, they abruptly released him to Saudi Arabia. After accusing Jose Padilla of planning to detonate a dirty bomb (but not charging him with that or any other crime), and after keeping him locked up as an enemy combatant, the government charged him with unrelated crimes just in time to avoid defending his detention before the Supreme Court.

In both cases, the government had claimed that it was vital to our national security to keep these men in prison without charges -- so vital that it was worth scrapping both the plain meaning of the fifth and sixth amendments to the Constitution and centuries of legal tradition in order to hold them as uncharged enemy combatants. Oddly enough, however, keeping Hamdi locked up and Padilla uncharged was less important than keeping the Bush administration's supposed right to detain United States citizens without charges, indefinitely, from being challenged in court. It's an interesting set of priorities.

Now, right before the Uighurs' case comes before the DC Circuit Court, the government has found a way to moot this appeal as well. If the Bush administration's lawyers and policy makers had the courage of their convictions, they would not be afraid to make their case in court, on the merits.

Still, I am happier than I can say that Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim are free, and I wish them and their families every possible happiness.

There is a kind of viticulture renaissance happening in Albania, a Balkan land. California obtained, via an exclusive Viennese horticulturist a Croatian zinfandel, whose lineage was mysterious until molecular bioscience identified the plant source of CA's now famous zinfandels lay in either Greece or Albania. The zinfandel plant in Croatia is known as "Crljenak Kastelanski", though it is obscure there, and rare; whereas in CA it was the basis of 1980s viticulture, and now remains a significant variety.

Better than planting watermelons with a diner plastic spoon in a sun bleached nondescript camp in the Caribbean; rather Albania has the cooler clime of a locale more resembling that in which the delicate European Vitis vinifera, the winegrape family of the distinctive premium varietals, does best. Although one of the most impoverished sections of Europe, perhaps a reasonable compromise if one is balancing a future in agrarian western China versus the past recent four years at Guantanamo.

Your diligence bore fruit for a few detainees, hilzoy. Call it habeas populaire.

1. The prisoner who told of the garden isn't among those released. I'm not sure what happens now that 5 of the 9 prisoners at Camp Iguana have been sent home. Joy for their friends, then loneliness worse than before, I'd guess. Maybe, though, the government is just doing this in stages, and The Gardener will be out soon as well.

2. DOD said in its http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2006/nr20060505-12980.html>press release that "[o]ur key objective has been to resettle the Uighurs in an environment that will permit them to rebuild their lives." I take this to mean that they will not be imprisoned in Albania. Indeed, the phrase 'rebuild their lives' suggests that someone at DOD has more of a conscience than has previously been shown. No one should tell Mr. Steele.

This administration has built up quite a track record of freeing people (or, in Jose Padilla's case, bringing unrelated charges) just in time to render their appeals moot, thereby preventing the courts from finding their conduct illegal or unconstitutional.

Same thing happened with the British prisoners in Guantanamo Bay: for a while they were dangerous terrorists/al-Qaeda sympathisers who could only be "released" if the UK government were willing to jail them indefinitely, and then suddenly, just as their cases were to come to the attention of an American court, they could be released.

The odd thing is - or I suppose it's not so odd - that even though both Bush and Cheney have repeatedly and publicly lied about the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, claiming that they are all "bad men", "taken on the battlefield", "enemies of the US" (actually, after years in Guantanamo Bay, the latter may be true, but who could blame them?). These statements have been made publicly, and have been publicly shown to be lies - not least by the willingness of the US government to release these prisoners whenever it looks like they'll get into legal hot water over holding them.

Yet they're never challenged on these particular lies, though they're among the most flagrant and most publicly-disprovable - and frankly, the most openly evil: to lie the US into a war of aggression is wrong, but to bear false witness against prisoners helplessly and absolutely in your power is straightforwardly evil.

What is the distinction between the five released to Albania and the four left behind? They've all been admitted to be innocent, right? Did Albania decide five was enough and nine was too many to take?

I guess the answer for two of them is that they had a court case coming up Monday, but what about the other three?

I'm happy for the Uighurs. One would think that my opinion of the Bush administration would not drop another level on this news, yet even when it does good, it sows evil. Any luck getting the "capable of repetition yet evading review" exception to mootness to hold here?

I can't believe I voted for this bunch of, to borrow a phrase, moronic brownshirt f**ks in 2000. Please forgive me.

Petitioners are being housed at the National Accomodation Center for Asylum Seekers in Tirana, which is operated by the Albanian Interior Ministry in conjunction with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Petitioners are being provided food, clothing, financial assistance as appropriate, and telephone access, and can apply for a work permit should they wish to seek employment. As applicants for refugee status, petitioners are free to travel around Albania, and once refugee status has been granted will be free to apply for travel documents permitting overseas travel.

Insofar as that has meaning beyond an attempted pop reference, meaning OMG, the lawnmowers outside the building are driving me crazy! -- ok, beyond meaning that -- ok, about Albania -- ok, y'know, I have no thoughts, now, beyond the lawn-mowers.

I find it hard to be too overjoyed when 30% of the prisoners at Guantanamo are in the same situation as the Uighurs. Especially given the reality that the government did this to avoid accountability and with no opportunity for support or planning for the Uighurs.